A senior counter-terrorism source said: “There has always been the danger of trivialising what these people were doing. They were engaged in paramilitary training for terrorism, they talked repeatedly of fighting and killing non-believers and they rejected Muslims who did not follow their path.

“They posed a huge danger to young impressionable people who could have been lured into terrorism.”

This sort of trivialising of the threat has happened repeatedly in the U.S. by people intent on making a political case against the Bush Adminstration.

The refusal of the Obama-Pelosi Democrats to reauthorize FISA surveillance authorities is the ultimate trivialization of terror. The fall campaign will largely turn on whether a majority of Americans are willing to listen to Obama, Pelosi Reid and the rest who want us to believe that the ’90s are back, and 9/11 a distant, one-time tragedy.